When will Malta get to grips with the problems facing the national health service? More to the point, when are the health authorities going to draw up a holistic plan to tackle what has become to be considered by many as an intractable situation?
If the shortage of medicine supplied under the national health service has proved to be recurring problem, so is the shortage of bed space at Mater Dei Hospital. Both have given headaches to the administration and to the public but it seems the country is taking far too long to find solutions.
Only a short time after the nurses’ union called on the Health Minister to postpone the introduction of new services until understaffing and space problems were resolved, the Prime Minister announced plans for the building of two additional wards at Mater Dei. The union’s call of course makes sense because a new service cannot be run efficiently if the staff complement is short of what is required.
When the mental hospital had a couple of serious incidents some time ago, the nurses commented that the complement there was “not even adequate to provide the necessary nursing care for the standard patients, let alone for the intensive care patients who usually require more supervision”.
Dissatisfaction and frustration are bound to arise every time an administration fails to take full consideration of the nurses’ complement when opening new hospitals, wards in existing hospitals, or new services.
Yet, going by what the nurses’ union says so often, it would seem that this is precisely one of the reasons for the discontent in the service.
What had apparently triggered disgruntlement recently was a decision to turn a psychiatric outpatients section at Mater Dei into another ward. This, noted the union, required at least 12 other nurses to run.
Also according to the union, there were already two wards being manned by one nurse per shift instead of by two while medical and surgical wards had three or four nursing vacancies. At the intensive therapy unit, one nurse had to attend to two or three patients instead of one.
The union considered the opening of another ward as a slap in the face of all nurses considering it as proof that the health ministry was ignoring the pressure facing its members.
Understaffing has become a standard complaint and, going by the number of times the issue comes to the fore, it does not seem that the authorities are taking the issue seriously enough. Or if they are, the way they are tackling it is not producing the results the nurses and their union reasonably expect.
The Health Minister has now quantified the problem of bed shortage, saying that Mater Dei had to have 400 more beds to handle acute cases. Given that the two new wards planned to be built will only take 68 beds, the problem will be far from solved.
The nurses’ union suggests building a new hospital but this obviously needs serious study and, in any case, other solutions would have to be found until the administration begins to see if it is feasible to go in that direction.
Whenever and wherever new bed space is found, there will naturally be need for more nurses and other staff. And that is precisely why a long-term plan is required to ensure that the service gets the staff complement it needs to be run efficiently.